The Political Demography of Conflict in Modern Africa

The Political Demography of Conflict in Modern Africa Elliott D. Green 1 Development Studies Institute London School of Economics [email protected] July 2009 Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa has shifted from having a very low population density and no population growth in the 19 th century to an extremely high population growth today. While some political demographers have linked the continent’s high population growth rate to current conflict and civil wars, I argue here that a more important cause of contemporary conflict has been this rapid demographic shift over the past century and a half. Specifically, I show that low population density historically contributed to low economic growth, communal and unequal property rights, and high levels of ethnic diversity in the pre-colonial and colonial periods, which have combined with recent high population growth rates to produce large amounts of ‘sons of the soil’ conflict over land in contemporary Africa. To test this argument I examine cases of contemporary civil wars in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo; an examination into the counterfactual case of the Rwandan genocide provides additional support for my theory. 1 This paper is based upon a earlier version presented at a conference on Demography and Security at Harvard University in May 2009. I thank the conference participants along seminar participants at the LSE and Gareth Austin, Tim Dyson, Sean Fox and Omar McDoom for many useful suggestions. All errors are of course my own. Perhaps the most important thing to understand when comparing African societies to those of other regions of the world is that historically speaking, the continent has the lowest population density of any of the major continents. This crucial fact has shaped all aspects of African life (Collins & Burns, 2007, p. 40). 1. Introduction The politics of population growth in contemporary Africa has largely been a neglected topic. While there is growing interest in the long-term causes and consequences of Africa’s historical low population density (Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson, 2002; Austin, 2008; Herbst, 2000; Nunn, 2008), there remains relatively little interest in assessing the political consequences of demographic change in contemporary Africa. My goal here is thus to assess these consequences, especially in relation to issues of conflict and violence. The literature on conflict and demography has long moved away from a simple Malthusian model whereby high population density leads directly to violence. Rather, as suggested variously by such authors as (Goldstone, 1991; Homer-Dixon, 1999; Kahl, 2006), high population growth can lead to violence only indirectly through such mechanisms as rigid political institutions, the high salience of group cleavages, unequal access to resources and the lack of institutional inclusivity, among other factors. However, the analysis of these mechanisms have largely remained at the non-geographical level, with little attention to why or how population growth might affect some parts of the world more than others. In this paper I focus on the link between conflict and demographic change in Sub-Saharan Africa. I argue that historically low population densities in Africa have indirectly provided the opportunities, motives and collective action necessary for conflict via the existence of wide-spread poverty, inefficient land-holding structures and ethnic diversity, respectively. More specifically, I claim that recent population growth has combined with these three variables to produce a specific type of conflict, namely ‘sons of the soil’ conflict over land. The preponderance of this type of conflict across Africa can thus can be traced to a large and, by world historical standards, very quick shift from low population densities to high population growth over the past century and a half. The paper is structured as follows. First I explain how Africa’s historic low population densities have resulted in low economic growth, communal and unequal land-holding structures, and ethnic diversity. Second, I detail how high population growth beginning after World War I has impacted African states negatively through these three processes, with attention to examples from Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I also examine the counterfactual case of Rwanda, where I demonstrate that an historically high population density did not contribute to ‘sons of the soil’ conflict but did indirectly result in the 1994 genocide, thereby adding further support for my theory. Finally I conclude with some wider thoughts on political demography and conflict in Africa. 2. The Consequences of Low Population Density in Modern Africa Debates have raged among historians as to the causes of Africa’s low population density: while some have suggested that Africa was sparsely populated due to ‘ancient rocks, poor soils, fickle rainfall, abundant insects and unique prevalence of disease’ (Iliffe, 2007, p. 1), others have placed more emphasis on the 2 role of the intercontinental slave trade in extracting people from the continent (Manning, 1990; Nunn, 2008; Zuberi, Sibanda, Bawah, & Noumbissi, 2003). Regardless of the causes, there is almost universal agreement that pre-colonial Africa’s population density was low and, due to large population growth elsewhere, sharply decreasing relative to other regions by the beginning of the colonial period in the late 19 th century. The political and economic consequences of low population density have not, however, drawn as much attention. Here I focus on three major consequences for pre-colonial and colonial Africa, namely low economic growth, a communal and unequal property rights system, and ethnic diversity, each of which I examine in order. 2.1. Low Economic Growth Malthus originally argued that there is no link between per capita income and population density, since economic growth would spur higher fertility and lower mortality, thereby increasing population but not per capita income. However, in recent decades economists and historians have moved away from Malthus’s argument to the point where many like (Acemoglu et al., 2002) have used population density as a proxy for per capita income in the pre-modern world. Several reasons lie behind this assumption, including the economies of scale and increased levels of specialization that come with higher densities alongside higher agricultural productivity and greater technological change that can spur economic growth (Boserup, 1965; Kremer, 1993). As specifically regards Africa, there is good evidence that its low population density has posed an impediment to economic development in at least four ways. First, economists and historians have long emphasized how Africa’s high land/labor ratio has led to high labor costs and a subsequent reliance upon labor-saving, land- extensive agriculture (Austin, 2008). As a result there were few incentives to increase agricultural productivity, while widely dispersed farms were difficult to link together with transport infrastructure (Herbst, 2000). Moreover, the practice of extensive agriculture led inevitably to migration once a piece of land was fully exploited, which meant a necessary lack of non-transportable material possessions (Sjaastad & Bromley, 1997). Second, a scarcity of labor also meant that slave raiding arose before the arrival of the Europeans, thus aiding the development of the intercontinental slave trade. (Iliffe, 2007, p. 133), for instance, notes that ‘underpopulation, with the consequent difficulty of commanding labor by purely economic means, had already stimulated slavery and slave-trading among many, but not all, African peoples.’ The effects of the slave trade were economically pernicious in many ways. Not only did it ‘remove labor from a labor-scarce continent, the opposite of what the economies required for long-term growth’ (Austin, 2008, p. 613), but it also encouraged the growth of ‘theft, bribery and [the] exercise of brute force… slavery thus may be seen as one source of pre-colonial origins for modern corruption’ (Manning, 1990, p. 124). Moreover, ethnic fractionalization, whose negative effects on economic development have been widely discussed (Easterly & Levine, 1997), has a positive relationship with historic slave exports, suggesting that the slave trade prevented the formation of larger ethnic identities (Nunn, 2008). Third, a low population density put Africans at a severe disadvantage in resisting the onslaught of European imperialism, whose links with economic underdevelopment in Africa are now well established in the literature (Acemoglu, 3 Johnson, & Robinson, 2001). Many scholars have noted the remarkable speed with which Europeans conquered the continent, which was in part due to the continent’s low population density. To use (Hirschman, 1970)’s terminology, given a choice between the ‘voice’ of resistance and ‘exiting’ by escaping to open land away from colonial domination, most Africans naturally chose the latter option (Herbst, 2000). Indeed, the most prominent example of African resistance to imperialism, namely the Ethiopian defeat of the Italians at Adowa in 1896, was partially a consequence of Emperor Menelik’s ability to draw upon an army of 100,000 soldiers compared to less than 20,000 for the Italians. What made Ethiopia different in this regard was her highlands, which across Africa contain 4% of total land mass but almost 20% of its population, and which allowed for a great abundance of population in central and northern Ethiopia (McCann, 1995, pp. 23, 89). Fourth

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